Paulchili

Find a nice destination in Asia and fly there with JL.
J awards are fairly easy to get on JL - so far. Get it while you can and get rid of those pesky AA miles

millionmiler

Probably luck, yes. Even in the "old days" and even the "very old days" upgrades to Hawaii were hard to get.

That said though the situation now is much worse.

tth6133

J awards on JL are not easy to get, unless you travel from SAN or have the flexibility to travel on very short notice.

Paulchili

You apparently know very little about JL awards.
True - you cannot get them 3 or 6 months out but they are PLENTIFUL when planning ahead.
Here is a sampling for Dec 2017 (as far out as you can book at present) - I could have gone further back in December but you get the idea (from KVS and confirmed on JL website, where there are no phantom awards):
SFO-HND
12/9 J9
12/10 J9
12/11 J9
12/12 J9
12/13 J9
12/14 J9

LAX-NRT
12/9 J2
12/10 J2
1211 J9
12/12 J4
12/13 J3
12/14 J2
* note J9 is on KVS - on JL it shows even more (some days 5-15 or 16+)
Sadly F seems to have gone the way of CX lately - how long before J will follow as well?
How is that for JL J availability - enough for you? Try to find that with CX or AA Who else in OW has this type of J award availabilty - if you know, please tell me.
No need to fly from SAN (or last minute) - just plan ahead.

YoungBubbie

We thought it was bad now finding milesaver seats.

What's it's going to be like going forward now that every AA employee is going to get 2 tickets to anywhere after being named 2017 Airline of the Year by Air Transport World.

FlyerBeek

I believe those are positive space economy tickets. If AA isn't releasing MileSAAver seats to begin with, than there really shouldn't be much impact.

-FlyerBeek

wco81

Blogger claimed there was J saver awards to Australia available in high season.

So I went and checked for SFO-SYD as a simple test.

Found only one outbound between Sept and the end of the 330 days for 80k.

That was SJC-DFW-SYD. DFT-SYD was on QF A380 but it was in Y and it made for a 31-hour transit.

Found some real J awards for the return in early and mid October for 80k, with he SYD-LAX TPAC.

Well it's something, but late Sept, early to mid Oct is not high season in SYD.

And it's not a real premium cabin award.

Jeffw5555

There are all kinds of reasons why you choose one airline over another. It seems there are a lot of guys on this thread that value redeeming miles. So if miles are important to you, why do you continue to fly AA? As it has been pointed out, miles on AA are worth a third (at best) of UA miles, which is actually stretching it, because AA miles are almost worthless on many routes.

So with you continuing to fly AA, you are signaling to them that you are OK with their abysmal FF program. And by you continue to do so, you are signaling to UA that they could devalue their program accordingly to match AA's horrible program.

I am 1mm on UA, so went with AA last year and made Platinum, to see if the "grass was greener" at AA. (it isn't, to my chagrin, it is brown at AA) As others have pointed out, the only advantage to AA right now is greater F upgrades. On all other measures, AA is far worse.

I have stopped flying AA because miles are important to me.

akcae

Specious claim at best -- miles are worth to each individual based on how well they can redeem it on the routes and in class of service important to THEM.

I just redeemed 3xJ to EU in the peak summer travel time at 57.5K (and then got 10K rebated by Citi) so to *me* these miles are quite valuable. If I needed them to fly in J or F direct to HKG or SYD on short notice *then* they'd be close to worthless.

I fly AA when convenient or price-advantageous. For many, especially business fliers, mileage earning is secondary. I have a colleague based in ATL and he will *not* fly anything but DL simply because DL gets him anywhere he needs to go on a direct flight. Taking a connection is simply a non-starter when flying to client sites.

I suspect for many of us, flying is not the main source of RDM earning anyway.

Fair enough, your reasons are your own -- you value miles and you don't value AA miles, so you shouldn't fly AA.

shimps1

I was curious about this as well, and looked everywhere from 12/10 all the way back to 9/1. Only 1 80k flight to SYD found, and it was mixed cabin with DFW>SYD being economy. No idea where they saw the availability they mentioned.

FlyerTalkUserName

Were you searching explicitly LAX-SYD? If you were searching anything other than that then I'm betting your search was severely limited due to the lack of domestic saver economy or domestic saver first availability into LAX.

Paulchili

One award in 330 days is essentially the same as NO award availability at all.
As simple as that.

Jeffw5555

True, I guess my claim applies to domestic, international is another story. Go to any domestic route, any date, then make a comparison between AA and UA saver availability on any fare class. There is no comparison at all. And UA will also show you availability of standard awards, whereas at AA you need to force it or call an agent to get them.

As I have noted previously, I fly the kids around the country to school and such. On routes out of hubs, whether DFW for AA or ORD for UA, there is rarely any nonstop saver availability on AA whereas there is almost always some availability on UA.

rufflesinc

A reason why that happens is that UA will let you route thru Europe to Asia and thru Asia to Australia.

Paulchili

That alone is reason enough for me to ditch AA as direct award flights to Oz with either AA or QF are NON EXISTENT, whereas with UA I have availability daily on 3 different routings to Oz.
There are plenty of other reasons to quit the new AA (like lots of availability to EU with OS & TK, etc).